| While several contemporary studies have examined the social, historical, and theoretical dimensions of the house and home in American, French, and German literature, insofar as English literature is concerned there is a deficiency of material. Most literary studies concerning the English house and home focus almost exclusively on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Hence, this dissertation distinguishes itself from other studies by focusing on the literary transformations in house and home from the late-Victorian to the interwar period. This research concludes at the interwar period because World War II ushers in an entirely different set of concerns relating to these subjects as a result of massive displacement and demolition in England.;This work focuses on the following four novels: Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1887), John Galsworthy's The Man of Property (1906), E.M. Forster's Howards End (1910), and Elizabeth Bowen's To the North (1932). In this study, I demonstrate how the houses in these novels become highly experiential sites in which the boundaries between interior and exterior are transgressed, if not dissolved, by larger spatial dislocations amongst the city, the country, and the suburbs. Furthermore, these domestic structures stage disturbances in class, gender, and family. While houses still remain central to dwelling, they become uncanny and unfamiliar sites where the concept of home becomes increasingly unattainable within them.;This study is largely interdisciplinary, informed by historical materialist approaches to literature as well as drawing upon theories of architecture and visual studies. My chapters engage some of the following theoretical issues: the distinctions between the figure of the house and the conceptual image of home; homelessness in the domestic interior; the uncanny; nostalgia; passing within and through space; tensions amongst the city, the suburbs, and the country; historical changes in English housing; and connections between the domestic interior and landscape painting. |
